War on Terror

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

As U.S. imperialism loses its capacity to compete outside the military sphere, its foreign policy options shrink, accordingly. “Since the U.S. is superior to the rest of the world ONLY in military terms, Washington finds its ultimate advantage in turning the whole world into a battlefield.” Permanent War follows the same logic as a death cult. In fact, one created the other – literally.

by David Swanson

Is the US engaged in ghastly human experimentation at Guantanamo? Absolutely, says US Marine Sgt. Tom Hickman a tower guard supervisor the night in 2006 when three detainees, tortured beyond endurance apparently succeeded in taking their own lives. Hickman is the author of Murder at Camp Delta: A Staff Sergeant's Pursuit of the Truth About Guantanamo Bay. Catch David Swanson's show eavery week on SoundCloud.

by Danny Haiphong

The Black Misleadership Class comes in all genders, and cares only for itself. Beyonce has forged a putrid class alliance with Condoleezza Rice, “a war criminal responsible for the deaths of millions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world.” Beyonce is a bipartisan suck-up to Power. She’s already buddies with the top Democratic imperialist, Barack Obama.

President Obama’s perpetual scam machine is in high gear – which signals another expansion of war and war-powers accumulation. The president played the reluctant warrior who doesn’t really want the limitless powers he has arrogated to himself. But, what he’s seeking is formal authorization to escalate the U.S. offensive against world order and civil liberties.

As more and more of the nation is transformed into “sacrifice zones” like Detroit and Camden, New Jersey, with civil liberties stripped bare, the biosphere pushed to the point of no return, and the corporate security estate triumphant, “it is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare.”

“We have been under siege for ten years, maybe longer,” said Dr. Anthony Monteiro, professor of African American studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia. “It’s been under attack because what African American studies represents is a fundamental paradigm challenge to the white academy.” Monteiro was part of a conference on Black studies held over the weekend at Temple, the first institution to offer a PhD in the discipline, in 1988. “We are not beholden to these other departments and disciplines,” he said. “In fact, our world view emerges from a deep critique of what they do – and that’s where the blowback comes from.”

FBI “Fishing Expedition” Against the Press

Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim that he should absent himself from the investigation of the FBI’s seizure of Associated Press phone records is “all about trying to maintain plausible deniability” of involvement, said Kevin Gosztola, a journalist with FireDogLake.com who has written extensively on government spying. It is “cowardice, frankly, said Gosztola, “to not want to face the media, who would be outraged when they found out that an establishment news media organization was the victim of an FBI fishing expedition.”

No FEAR Act anniversary

The federal No FEAR Act, signed into law 11 years ago, “came out of an incredibly hostile work environment throughout the federal government,” said Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, a whistleblower and former Environmental Protection Agency senior analyst. “Our goal was to change the culture of how government works. We didn’t quite achieve that,” she said, but “there was one moment in history when federal employees said: To hell with the jobs, to hell with the benefits, I’m going to fight for justice.”

President Obama the Best Choice Imperialism Ever Made

“One of the greatest accomplishments for imperialism, is that he has moved more of our people into the imperial camp,” said Kali Akuno, of the Malcolm X Grass Roots Movement. Akuno spoke on the Your World News documentary film, The More Effective Evil: The Impact of President Obama on the Black Community and Humanity, produced by Solomon Comissiong. “Whoever the folks are who trained him and have been his handlers, from the imperialist perspective, should be given their props, because they picked a good one.”

South Africa “Most Unequal” Society in the World

Many of South Africa’s Black political elite “have used the opportunities to accumulate at the expense of the vast majority,” said Molefi Ndlovu, a community activist and researcher at the Center for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in Durban. “That’s why we can speak of South Africa as being the most unequal society in the world, more than Brazil and other places,” said Ndlovu, speaking on the latest edition of Black Agenda Television. “It makes a lot of us a bit nervous about exactly where is the soul of the” [ruling African National Congress] party going.”

Selective Federal Gun Prosecutions in Black Indianapolis

In conjunction with a local police offensive, the U.S. Attorney in Indianapolis has vowed to fully prosecute gun crimes in five so-called “hot zones” – all of them centered in Black neighborhoods – but not in the rest of the city. Rev. Byron Vaughn, of Prisoners Reformed United, says the policy represents selective, racial law enforcement. “They made it a racial issue,” said Rev. Vaughn, a former prison inmate. People are being singled out because of “where they live.”

These days, a radical label can get you killed. In National Security Speech, “it is clear that to ‘radicalize’ means very much the same as to ‘weaponize’; the radicalized person has been transformed into a weapon.” Under such assumptions, the secret police feel justified in using lethal force on purely political pretexts.

Thanks to The First Black President and The First Black Attorney General, “the only people safe in speaking of or contacting Shakur are those who mean her harm.” To speak of Black liberation, its heroes and history, is a crime of terror. “Barack Obama has made manifest his predecessor’s desire to create a truly fascist machinery in this country.”

Assatu Shakur has been made the face of terror on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, but there is a larger target. “They are publicly defining the Black liberation movement as a priority domestic target for repression.” On Thursday, the Black Is Back Coalition holds a demonstration for Assata’s safety and freedom for all political prisoners.

Lynne Stewart has served three years for the crime of zealously defending her client. Suffering stage 4 cancer, she sometimes sheds “a few tears at the love and intensity of those who have written to state their support.” Family and friends ask that she be allowed compassionate release, but “the Federal Bureau of Prisons rarely even bothers to submit compassionate release requests to the courts.”

The Sahel region of northern Africa was among the first to be militarized under U.S. “war on terror” doctrine. It is now described as “an arc of instability said to run 4,000 miles from Somalia through the Sahel to the central Sahara.” The U.S. created the conditions that will “likely constitute a key argument to justify the amplification of AFRICOM’s budget.”

The simple decency of Bradley Manning, who faces life in prison for being a good citizen, throws in graphic relief the infinite depravity of the current U.S. regime. “Lawlessness has now become perfected and normalized under the Obama administration.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s dismissal of a suit against the National Security Agency’s wholesale spying on telephone and internet systems “essentially holds the NSA above the law,” said Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Committee. Unless the plaintiffs can document that they, personally, have been monitored, they “have no right to appear in a federal court to challenge the program,” Shahid explained. But, since the program is secret, it is all but impossible for individuals to prove their case.

DNA vs. the Bill of Rights

The High Court is considering how police departments can collect and use people’s DNA. The case centers on Maryland’s DNA law, under which at least one victim of crime was later convicted of another, subsequent crime, based on his DNA. All 49 other states have filed briefs supporting Maryland’s law. Black Maryland state lawmaker Jill Carter, of Baltimore, who opposed the law when it was passed in 2009, said “every state in the country could be permitted to collect DNA from people who are not convicted of any crime.”

Detroit to Lose Control of Finances

Michigan’s Republican governor plans to name a financial manager to oversee the 83 percent Black city of Detroit, which would join five other Michigan municipalities and three school districts that have been stripped of local financial control. “Both Democrats and Republicans have had it in for Detroit ever since the 1967 uprising,” said Joyce Schon, of the activist organization BAMN, By Any Means Necessary. Resistance to the takeover must go beyond legal appeals, Schon said. “I think it’s got to be direct action, anything we can possibly bring to the streets.”

The Ruling Austerity Consensus

There is a consensus among both major political parties on the need for austerity, said Left Business Observer publisher Doug Henwood. “The only controversy among the ruling elite is, just how much and what kind” of austerity. Meanwhile, U.S. organized labor “has no independent politics, and no independent capacity for thought.”

Philly Schools Turn Back Clock on Equality

Philadelphia school authorities are calling for draconian changes in the system’s operations, including elimination of limits on class size – on top massive school closings. “I think that it’s turning the clock back on guaranteeing every child equalization of opportunity,” said State Rep. W. Curtis Thomas. Many schools don’t have libraries, safety officers, nurses, clean bathrooms, books, computers, or “teachers that are teaching in their areas of competency,” said Thomas, who wants Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, “along with the federal courts, to step in and straighten this situation out.”

“The current insecurity in Mali is a direct result of the US military presence...and why Africans must be more forthright in opposing the expansion of the US Africa Command.” France plays a special role in this escalation, as she maneuvers to hold on to her African holdings. The U.S. and France trained and financed the same jihadists they are now fighting.

Years before 9/11, the Sudanese government offered to turn Osama bin Laden over to the Saudis for transfer to the U.S. Instead, the U.S. refused the offer, and later attacked a Sudanese pharmaceuticals factory. “Why did Rice and Clarke really turn their backs on the Sudanese?”

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) charge the United States violated international law and its own Constitution with the killing of three Americans citizens in Yemen, last year. “These deaths are connected to a broader program of targeted killing that, in our view, has no lawful basis,” said CCR lawyer Padiss Kebriaei. American-born cleric Anwar Aulaqi, his teenage son and an associate were never formally charged with any crime.

No Compromise with Stop-and-Frisk

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is “trying to gather up Black politicians and Black ministers who will sit down and negotiate ‘reforms’ to stop-and-frisk,” said Carl Dix, a founder of Stop Stop-and-Frisk. “But, you can’t reform injustice – you have to get rid of it.” Dix took part in the final day of a family vigil for Ramarley Graham, the unarmed Black teenager killed by police in his Bronx home in front of his family.

Half a Million to be Disenfranchised by Photo ID Laws

At least 500,000 eligible voters will find they can’t vote on Election Day, due to photo ID laws passed in ten states, according to a report from the Brennan Justice Center. Keesha Gaskins, co-author of the report, said many of those affected “live more than 10 miles from an ID-issuing office” and “lack access to a vehicle.” The Black Belt South and Brown Belt areas bordering Mexico are “really graphic examples of where these problems” arise, said Gaskins.

Black Radio Facing “Demise”

With radio in general confronting a “dying revenue stream,” Black-oriented commercial broadcasting “may be entering an era in which there will be no concessions to culture” and to Black political and social development by the mega-chains that own the media, said Dr. Todd Burroughs, of Morgan State University, in Baltimore. Burroughs is among the signatories to a letter asking the Federal Communications Commission to investigate “the demise” of Black radio.

Black Soldiers Crucial to American War of Independence

Black soldiers “were the most experienced fighters” at Yorktown, comprising a quarter of the soldiers under General George Washington’s command in the decisive battle, said Alan Gilbert, author of Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence. Gilbert disputes estimates that only 5,000 Blacks fought for American separation from Britain. However, far more Blacks served with the British, who promised freedom, while Washington’s Continental Army did not.

President Obama will be remembered as one of the chief architects of the American police state. His preventive detention law nullifies due process, leaving citizens naked to the whims of the executive. Now Obama has empowered himself to seize control of all the nation’s communications systems, under the guise of emergency preparedness. “The ‘emergency’ he has in mind is a State of Emergency – martial law.

The White House has put in writing its policies for sub-Saharan Africa. The problem is, there’s hardly a word of truth in the document, and not a single mention of AFRICOM, the U.S. military command on the continent. The presidential paper repeats Obama’s 2009 lecture to Africans on “good governance.” He also warned that they avoid the “excuses” of blaming “neocolonialism” and “racism” for their problems. Meanwhile, AFRICOM is “positioning the U.S. to launch coups at will against African civilian, or even military, leaders that fall out of favor with Washington.”

Obama’s handlers, with the able assistance of the New York Times, paint a presidential portrait that “reconciles the old, imagined Obama with Dick Cheney’s ‘dark side.’” The president routinely violates international law and subverts the U.S. Constitution but, we are told, he does so with a keen sense of moral obligation. His millions of victims should be pleased.

The U.S. government has been become so brash, so cynical in its entrapments and pure persecutions of Muslims, it is beyond embarrassment. The shameless cannot be shamed. Khalifa al-Kalili tried to hold a press conference to explain that the government was trying to frame him – so they arrested him on other trumped up charges. “A laundry list of people who have been turned into criminals by our government is useless unless a call to action comes along with it.”

by Wilmer J. Leon III, Ph.D.

The first Black president and first Black attorney general have so twisted the Constitutional guarantees of due process of law, that “not only can American citizens be indefinitely detained, they can also be assassinated by their own government at the will and whim of their President.” Eric Holder’s interpretation of the nation’s basic law is both sinister and incompetent. “Holder sounds a lot like former Bush administration counsel John Yoo, the author of the opinion justifying torture.”

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder made the Constitution scream, in an effort to justify his president’s claim to “the power of life and death over any inhabitant of the planet, including citizens of the United States.” Discovering presidential powers never before revealed, Holder severed citizens’ rights to “due process” from the “judicial process.” Access to the courts is not required, when the president is judge, jury and executioner.

Last week’s FBI raids likely signal that the Obama regime has begun a major campaign to criminalize and crush the Left. Think COINTELPRO, 21st century-style. President Obama, the constitutional rights lawyer who claims the right to kill at will, seeks to strangle the activist opposition to his wars and pro-Wall Street policies. “For targets not marked for oblivion, there awaits a grand jury with boundless powers to ensnare anyone.”

Not since the massive Klu Klux Klan marches of the 1920s have white nationalists strutted their stuff so proudly. The “media-validated” Tea Partyers are on a roll, and are even getting physical with Black folks in lower Manhattan, where they plan a national rally on 9/11. The anti-racist opposition will also be out in strength, in solidarity with Muslims and, hopefully, to strongly encourage white supremacists to find someplace else to gather.

Once citizenship can be stripped away by the state, the Constitution becomes a dead letter. Yet that is the self-mutilation prescribed by American politicians who would jettison every U.S. citizen’s rights just to spite the alleged Times Square bomber, a naturalized U.S. citizen. Most Americans seem incapable of understanding why Pakistanis, Yemenis and others that are being killed by the U.S. might also feel the need for vengeance.

With each year in the endless war on terror, the American state claims another exceptional right – most recently, the right to murder whoever it wants, wherever it wants. “Under this argument, the US government is allowed to decide who represents a possible threat to our nation anywhere anytime and then exterminate them before they can damage the US.” American citizens are also eligible for the hit list.

The U.S. wants film director Roman Polanski extradited from Switzerland to face the music for his sexual encounter with a 13-year-old girl, 30 years ago. Meanwhile, the U.S. harbors the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, wanted for numerous crimes over a long and murderous career, including blowing up an airliner in flight. Ain't American “values” wonderful?

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